Now Moon Mars and Asteroids will be mined. Get ready for space travell

An international group of scientists, mining and aerospace engineers, policy makers, and other specialists met in Golden, Colorado to discuss the use of space resources. Space Resources Roundtable II was held at the Colorado School of Mines, and was sponsored by the School of Mines, NASA, and the Lunar and Planetary Institute. Participants discussed lunar, martian, and asteroidal resources, along with economic and legal aspects of using extraterrestrial resources. This report focuses on lunar resources. Manufacture of useful materials on the Moon, Mars, or asteroids requires extensive use of what we know about those places through studies of lunar samples and meteorites from asteroids and Mars. It is applied cosmochemistry.



Matter from:-Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology

People are eventually going to be working and living in space. Construction and operation of lunar solar power stations may make that happen. Or perhaps it will happen to support a thriving space tourism business. Whatever drives it, there will be a need to use the resources available in space. It is too expensive to drag all the needed ingredients up from the Earth. The resources are available on the Moon, Mars, and asteroids. Participants in the Space Resources Roundtable agree that we need to explore extraterrestrial bodies for resources and to learn how to extract those resources from them. Experts in the mineralogy and chemical composition of extraterrestrial materials will play important roles in the search and mining of space resources. Like Earth explorers through the ages, we must live off the land and a new breed of scientist, the applied cosmochemist, will be there to see it happen.

LEONID METEOR SHOWER

LEONID METEOR SHOWER: The Leonid meteor shower peaks this year on Nov. 17th. The shower begins on Tuesday morning around 0900 UT (4 a.m. EST; 1 a.m. PST) with a sprinkling of 20 to 30 meteors per hour over North America.  The best place to be, however, is Asia, where forecasters expect as many as 300 Leonids per hour. The predicted outburst occurs between 2100 - 2200 UT, just before local dawn in that part of the world:
For more update visit:-http://www.spaceweather.com

Disaster management with the help of robots

Modern robotics can help where it is too dangerous for humans to venture. Search and rescue robots (S&R robots) have meanwhile become so sophisticated that they have already carried out their first missions in disasters. And for this reason rescue robots will be given a special place at the RoboCup 2009 – the robotics world championships in Graz.

The rescue robotics programme provided exciting rescue demonstrations in which two complex disaster scenarios formed the setting for the robots’ performances. An accident involving a passenger car loaded with hazardous materials and a fire on the rooftop of Graz Stadthalle were the two challenges that flight and rescue robots faced on their remote controlled missions. Smoke and flames made the sets as realistic as possible, ensuring a high level of thrills.

A remote controlled flight robot can help by reconnoitering the situation and sending information by video signals to the rescue services on the ground. As the robotics world championships, the RoboCup recognised the possible uses of rescue robots a long time ago and promoted their development in the separate category “RoboCup Rescue”. RoboCup 2009, organised by TU Graz, dedicates one particular focus to the lifesaving robots with a rescue robot demonstration, a practical course for first responders and a workshop for the exchange of experiences between rescue services and robotics researchers.

Searching space debris via network

Now, research by a team from the University of Southampton's School of Engineering Sciences, suggests a new technique for identifying key pieces of debris that should be targeted for removal from orbit.




Using network theory as a mathematical tool to identify these key pieces of debris, the Southampton team's approach involves looking for objects that might cause damage based on how many potential links they have to other objects. That is, how connected they are in a network. The greater the number of links, the greater the object's potential for causing damage.



The research was presented at the 59th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Glasgow this week by Dr Hugh Lewis of the University's School of Engineering Sciences. His presentation was based largely on work by Southampton PhD student, Rebecca Newland.



"The space debris environment can be thought of as a network in which the pieces of debris are connected if there is a possibility of them colliding," explains Rebecca Newland. "Once a network has been built it can be analysed to identify objects that are important to the overall structure of the network.



"To destroy a network it would be necessary to identify and remove those key objects, in the same way that targeting highly connected routers for removal could cripple the internet."



Space debris consists of any man-made object that no longer serves a useful purpose in space. Examples include redundant satellites, used rocket bodies and explosion or erosion fragments. Even small pieces have the potential to cause damage if involved in a collision, as many are travelling at speeds of around 10 kilometres per second.



"Previous modelling studies have suggested that even if no new satellites were launched, the number of objects orbiting the Earth will continue to increase as a result of predicted collisions between existing objects," comments Dr Hugh Lewis.



"For this reason, it is important to identify debris objects at risk of collision when making plans to 'clean-up' space.



"Objects need to be ranked according to the risk they pose so that they may be chosen for removal, and this is what our research aims to do."

The research was undertaken by Dr Hugh Lewis, Rebecca Newland, Dr Graham Swinerd and Arrun Saunders at the University of Southampton.

new research over life evolution on earth

Humans might not be walking on Earth today if not for the ancient fusing of two microscopic, single-celled organisms called prokaryotes, NASA-funded research has found. By comparing proteins present in more than 3000 different prokaryotes - a type of single-celled organism without a nucleus - molecular biologist James A. Lake from the University of California at Los Angeles' Center for Astrobiology showed that two major classes of relatively simple microbes fused together more than 2.5 billion years ago.
Lake's research reveals a new pathway for the evolution of life on Earth. These insights are published in the Aug. 20 online edition of the journal Nature.
This endosymbiosis, or merging of two cells, enabled the evolution of a highly stable and successful organism with the capacity to use energy from sunlight via photosynthesis.
Further evolution led to photosynthetic organisms producing oxygen as a byproduct. The resulting oxygenation of Earth's atmosphere profoundly affected the evolution of life, leading to more complex organisms that consumed oxygen, which were the ancestors of modern oxygen-breathing creatures including humans.
"Higher life would not have happened without this event," Lake said. "These are very important organisms. At the time these two early prokaryotes were evolving, there was no oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere. Humans could not live. No oxygen-breathing organisms could live."
The genetic machinery and structural organization of these two organisms merged to produce a new class of prokaryotes, called double membrane prokaryotes. As they evolved, members of this double membrane class, called cyanobacteria, became the primary oxygen-producers on the planet, generating enough oxygen to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere and set the stage for the evolution of more complex organisms such as animals and plants.
"This work is a major advance in our understanding of how a group of organisms came to be that learned to harness the sun and then effected the greatest environmental change Earth has ever seen, in this case with beneficial results," said Carl Pilcher, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., which co-funded the study with the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Va.
Founded in 1998, the NASA Astrobiology Institute is a partnership between NASA, 14 U.S. teams and six international consortia. The institute's goals are to promote, conduct, and lead interdisciplinary astrobiology research; train a new generation of astrobiology researchers; and share the excitement of astrobiology with learners of all ages.
The institute is part of NASA's Astrobiology Program in Washington. The program supports research into the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life on Earth and the potential for life elsewhere.

 Article from-www.spacedaily.com

Robot with a skin will help cure autism

Research is being going on to construct a  robot with artificial skin which is being developed as part of a project involving researchers at the University of Hertfordshire so that it can be used in their work investigating how robots can help children with autism to learn about social interaction.

Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn and her team at the University’s School of Computer Science are part of a European consortium, which is working on the three-year Roboskin project to develop a robot with skin and embedded tactile sensors.



The researchers will work on Kaspar (http://kaspar.feis.herts.ac.uk/), a child-sized humanoid robot developed by the Adaptive Systems research group at the University. The robot is currently being used by Dr. Ben Robins and his colleagues to encourage social interaction skills in children with autism. They will cover Kaspar with robotic skin and Dr Daniel Polani will develop new sensor technologies which can provide tactile feedback from areas of the robot’s body. The goal is to make the robot able to respond to different styles of how the children play with Kaspar in order to help the children to develop ‘socially appropriate’ playful interaction when interacting with the robot and other people.



“Children with autism have problems with touch, often with either touching or being touched,” said Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn. “The idea is to put skin on the robot as touch is a very important part of social development and communication and the tactile sensors will allow the robot to detect different types of touch and it can then encourage or discourage different approaches.”



Roboskin is being co-ordinated by Professor Giorgio Cannata of Università di Genova (Italy). Other partners in the consortium are: Università di Genova, Ecole Polytechnique Federale Lausanne, Italian Institute of Technology, University of Wales at Newport and Università di Cagliari.





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Adapted from materials provided by University of Hertfordshire, via AlphaGalileo.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090430065818.htm

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Gear system will assemble by itself

A technique created by Engineers at Columbia University to utilize


thermal expansion characteristics of dissimilar materials to create


mechanical devices could prove very useful in building small-scale


machines. A thin metal film is deposited on to a special polymer. When


the temperature is reduced, wrinkles form in the composite material


based on the structure's design due to the differing thermal expansion


characteristics of the materials. These wrinkles can be made to produce


formations such as gear teeth and other mechanical components. After


the required pattern is obtained, a hardening process is used to fix


the device's shape permanently. The application for micro and


nano-scale machines is more efficient because of its simplicity and


low production cost.

protecting earth from asteroid hazard

Asteroids are rocky fragments left over from the formation of the solar

system about 4.6 billion years ago. Most of these fragments of ancient
space rubble - sometimes referred to by scientists as minor planets -
can be found orbiting the Sun in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. This
region in our solar system, called the Asteroid Belt or Main Belt,
probably contains millions of asteroids ranging widely in size from
Ceres, which at 940 km in diameter is about one-quarter the diameter of
our Moon, to bodies that are less than 1 km across. There are more than
20,000 that are numbered.
 
 
Earlier this month, a skyscraper-sized asteroid passed within 50,000 miles of Earth — a galactic hair’s breadth separating the planet from an impact like one that flattened 800 square miles of Siberian tundra in 1908.




                                                                                                                                                             IMAGE BY NASA


Then there’s an asteroid spotted in 2004 and called Apophis. Astronomers originally thought it might hit Earth in 2029. Then they decided that it couldn’t. Finally they moved back the clock to 2036.



The uncertainty is understandable, but not exactly reassuring. And even if Apophis misses, some other rock big enough to put a serious dent in Earth and everything living here will take dead aim for us someday. It’s just a matter of time. Some researchers put the odds of a civilization-wrecker at one in the next 300,000 years, others at 1 in 10 for the next century.

Calling them "the only major natural hazard that we can effectively protect ourselves against,"
Direct nuclear explosions. As immortalized in the movie Armageddon, we could blow an asteroid out of the sky like so much interplanetary skeet. But there’s a catch: The pieces could still hit Earth, and we might not have enough firepower to do serious damage. It’s a last-minute, last-ditch option.




Nearby nuclear explosions. Rather than blowing it up, a nuclear explosion could reroute a space rock’s trajectory clear of Earth.

This would need to be done decades before the asteroid reached us. They are, after all, not easy to steer. But models suggest it could work.



Laser sublimation. Several spacecraft could use machines that direct beams of concentrated sunlight to the surface of an appropriately icy asteroid. As it heats up, it’ll spew a plume of debris and change course. Of course, anyone who’s ever tried to set a ball of paper aflame with a magnifying glass knows it’s not easy. Now imagine that the ball was rotating and traveling faster than sound.



Electric propulsion. To adjust course, land a spacecraft on an asteroid, fire up some rockets and push off. It’s a potentially powerful approach, but controlling that push on a spinning rock will be difficult.



Gravity tractor (pictured above). Every object exerts a gravitational pull, including a single spacecraft. Merely by hovering above the asteroid, it could pull the rock off course. The approach could even be tried with the asteroid belt-exploring Dawn spacecraft, scheduled to finish its tasks by 2015. This is potentially much easier than electric propulsion, but not quite as powerful.



Solar sails. Installing a photon-catching sail on an asteroid would be even harder than landing a ship, but it would certainly be prettier.



None of these approaches will work unless people see the asteroid in time to plan for it.



Under NASA’s Near Earth Objects program, six U.S. observatories

"search every clear night for these kinds of objects. They are tracked, cataloged and stored," said Steve Chesley, an astronomer at NASA’s Jet

Propulsion Laboratory. "NASA’s goal is to find 90 percent of those that are one kilometer across and larger. We’re at 82 percent right now, and we’ve only been aggressively searching at current levels for eight to 10

years. Those ones just haven’t flown into view."

NASA has suggested two possible methods of protecting the Earth from an asteroid or comet determined to be on a collision course.




Destroying the object before it hits the Earth
Deflecting the object from its orbit before it his the Earth

To destroy the Earth-approaching object, astronauts would land a spacecraft on the surface of the object and use drills to bury nuclear bombs deep below its surface. Once the astronauts were a safe distance away, the bomb would be detonated, blowing the object to pieces. Drawbacks to this approach include the difficulty and danger of the mission itself, and the fact that many of the resulting asteroid fragments might still hit the Earth, resulting in massive damage and loss of life.



In the deflection approach, powerful nuclear bombs would be exploded up to half a mile away from the object. The radiation created by the blast would cause a thin layer of object on the side nearest the explosion to vaporize and fly into space. The force of this material blasting into space would "nudge" or recoil the object in the opposite direction just enough to alter its orbit, causing it to miss the Earth. The nuclear weapons needed for the deflection method could be launched into position well in advance of the object's projected Earth impact.



But most important is its exact timing and our preparation to tackle such a disaster.

While these and other methods of protection have been considered, no definite plans have been fully developed. Scientists of the Asteroid and Comet Impact division of NASA's Ames Research Center warn that at least ten years will be needed to send a spacecraft to intercept an incoming object and deflect or destroy it. To that end, say scientists, NEO's mission of detecting threatening objects is critical to survival.

Bacteria will protect as from bioweapons

According to the researchers from the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research, they were able to discover the strategies that biofilm bacteria use.




In most cases biofilm bacteria develop in crowds and squat on areas where they create a community with other bacteria. They can develop on any surface to which bacteria can affix to. It is interesting to note that these biofilms cannot be destroyed by any disinfectants and antibiotics, not even phagocytes and our immune system are able to annihilate the biofilm bacteria.



This is one of the major problems in hospitals if biofilms create a community a catheter or implant, surfaces where bacteria may cause a dangerous infection.



Researchers working at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, located in Braunschweig, claim that they have spotted one of the main mechanisms that biofilms use in order to defend themselves against the attack of phagocytes.



Teamed up with colleagues from Australia, Great Britain and the United States, scientists are now publishing their discoveries in the popular specialist publication PLoS ONE. The finding states that biofilm bacteria apply chemical weapons to protect themselves.



Until recent findings, researchers could not understand the core of the biofilm problem - why phagocytes cannot destroy the biofilm bacteria. Dr. Carsten Matz was the one to start a serious investigation of the problem. The model for his research was the marine bacteria, which face continuous threats in their environment. The threat comes from the amoebae, whose behavior resembles the behavior of phagocytes. The amoebae acts the same way in the sea as the immune cells in human body, namely they look for and feed on the bacteria.



As long as bacteria are free and separated in the water, they turn into an easy target for the attackers. But when they become affixed to a surface and form a community with other bacteria, the amoebae is unable to assault them.



"The surprising thing was that the amoebae attacking the biofilms were de-activated or even killed. The bacteria are clearly not just building a fortress, they are also fighting back," says Carsten Matz.



In order to protect themselves, bacteria use chemical weapons. Marine bacteria, for instance, uses a very effective molecule called pigment violacein. After the protection system is prepared, the biofilm bacteria turn color soft purple. In case the invaders consume only one cell of the biofilm, together with the pigment included, they are instantly paralyzed and the chemical weapon activates their suicide mechanism.



"I feel that these results could offer a change of perspective. Biofilms may no longer be seen just as a problem; they may also be a source of new bioactive agents. When organized in biofilms, bacteria produce highly effective substances which individual bacteria alone cannot produce," says Carsten Matz.



Researchers look forward to apply these molecules in order to deal with a certain group of pathogens: parasites living in human body and causing serious infections, including sleeping illness and malaria. It is worth mentioning that amoeba represent olden relatives of these pathogens, which is why weapons obtained by the biofilm bacteria may offer a great basis for the development of new parasiticidal drugs.



Source: Eurekalert.org.

Now a robot will be your Doctor and best buddy

Robots that can cook, dance to Michael Jackson songs or guide the blind are among the gadgets aimed at helping humans cope with illnesses on display in Spain at one of the world's biggest annual gatherings of new technology enthusiasts.

Standing 58 centimetres (23 inches) tall and with a plastic shell for a body, a humanoid robot called Nao drew a crowd at the Campus Party in Valencia as it danced to Jackson's "Billie Jean" with a black hat on its head.

"I am thrilled to be at the Campus Party!" it said in in a mechanical voice in English.

The robot can recognize voices and faces and be instructed to turn on a personal computer, read e-mails or an online newspaper as well as be used to stimulate sufferers of Alzheimer's disease with memory exercises.

The company plans to start selling the robot in 2011 for between 3,000 and 3,500 euros (4,200 and 4,900 dollars).

Another star at the week-long event which wraps up on Sunday is a robot covered in artificial white fur called Paro that resembles a seal pup which can perceive people and its environment.

The cuddly robot has a diurnal rhythm, being active during the day but getting sleepy at night and reacts when it is spoken to or stroked.

It was designed by Japan's largest public research organization, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, with the aim of helping people with cognitive problems like autism or dementia.

People with severe memory loss can be prone to psychiatric disturbances, including hallucinations and personality changes, and the robot can provide a way to calm them or at least shift their mood.

It is also useful in engaging children in pediatric wards and can help people with autism, who struggle to communicate socially and have trouble understanding facial expressions, learn how to interact better with others.

Article adopted from: http://www.spacedaily.com/

Now a robot will detect life in space

A spaceship descends with a thunderous roar and deposits a futuristic probe before taking off again. The Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator (EVE) soon activates and begins flying around, scanning the barren surface for signs of life.




Scientists today can only dream of having a robotic explorer like EVE from the Disney/Pixar film "WALL•E." But some researchers are working on autonomous spacecraft, airships and rovers that can cooperate intelligently while exploring distant worlds.



"The orbiter gives you global perspective, the aerial platform a more regional perspective, and that helps determine where to deploy ground assets in a targeted fashion," said Wolfgang Fink, a physicist at Caltech in Pasadena, California.



Fink's vision of "tier-scalable reconnaissance" starts with an orbiting spacecraft to make a global survey for interesting scientific targets, before deciding on its own where to deploy an airship such as a dirigible. The airship could look even closer at a region to find the best landing site, and finally drop a rover or some other surface explorer. That surface explorer could then move quickly to the target area.



A demonstration of how such a surface explorer might deploy will take place in the Mars Science Laboratory mission, slated for a 2009 launch. NASA's Sky Crane carrier will hover above the surface of Mars on retrorockets while lowering an SUV-sized rover using a winch and tether.



Some Mars missions have already demonstrated the advantage of coordinating orbiters with surface explorers. Scientists used data from three Mars orbiters to determine the landing site for NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, and also turned orbiter cameras on the lander as it descended to the surface. Of the three orbiters, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has even helped NASA's separate Spirit and Opportunity Rovers navigate around obstacles on the Martian surface.



However, Fink and his collaborators want to take humans out of the loop and develop robots which can decide independently when and where to go. That becomes crucial for future missions to distant places such as the moons of Saturn or Jupiter, where a command signal from Earth can take over an hour to reach robotic explorers.



The key rests with software algorithms that help robots make command decisions on their own. Fink's group has begun testing such algorithms by using three small rovers and a camera that looks down on a simulated indoor landscape. The camera identifies both targets and obstacles, which allows the rovers to deploy and drive around obstacles to reach their targets — all without human intervention.



"Integration is the biggest challenge," Fink noted. "At Caltech, we are now at the point where we're implementing a test-bed outdoors to develop the software to demonstrate this in action."



The outdoors test would involve a miniature airship taking the place of the camera. Researchers from around the world would be able to give commands to the airship via Internet and watch it move and deploy the rovers on its own.



The field tests may pave the way for using similar command software on the proposed NASA and European mission to Titan or Europa. Fink and other researchers involved with the planning have begun discussing how such a mission might shape up by the 2017 launch date.



"A Titan mission would have the orbiter deploying a balloon, and we're already thinking about having a lander," Fink explained. "There you have a three-tier mission."



The tiered approach may eventually take the form of a robot that "does its own reconnaissance, goes out and looks for anomalies, finds something interesting and makes contact with the sender," Fink said, pointing to the Imperial probe from "The Empire Strikes Back" which lands on the ice planet Hoth.



Perhaps best of all, intelligent robots could react quickly to surprises and investigate anomalies — such as a geyser on Saturn's moon Enceladus, or a landslide on Mars.

Mission Chandrayaan-1

                                                                                                  Sequence



Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft was launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, SHAR, Sriharikota by PSLV-XL (PSLV-C11) on 22 October 2008 at 06:22 hrs IST in an highly elliptical initial orbit (IO) with perigee (nearest point to the Earth) of 255 km and an apogee (farthest point from the Earth) of 22,860 km, inclined at an angle of 17.9 deg to the equator. In this initial orbit, Chandrayaan orbited the Earth once in about six and a half hours.





Subsequently, the spacecraft's Liquid Apogee Motor (LAM) firing was done on 23 October at 09:00 hrs IST, when the spacecraft was near perigee, to raise the apogee to 37,900 km while the perigee to 305 km. The spacecraft took eleven hours to go round the Earth once.





The orbit was further raised to 336 km x 74,715 km on 25 October at 05:48 hrs IST. In this orbit, spacecraft took about twenty-five and a half hours to orbit the Earth once.





The LAM was fired again on 26 October at 07:08 hrs IST to take the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft to extremely high elliptical orbit with apogee 164,600 km and perigee at 348 km. Chandrayaan-1 took about 73 hours to go round the Earth once.





On 29 October, orbit raising was carried out at 07:38 hrs IST to raise the apogee to 267,000 km and perigee to 465 km. Chandrayaan’s present orbit extends more than half the way to moon and takes about six days to orbit the Earth.





On 4 November at 04:56 hrs IST, Chandrayaan entered the Lunar Transfer Trajectory with an apogee of 380,000 km.





On 8 November at 16:51 hrs IST, the spacecraft’s Liquid engine was fired to reduce its velocity to insert the spacecraft in the lunar orbit (LOI) and enable lunar gravity to capture it. As a result, the spacecraft was in an elliptical orbit with periselene (nearest point to the moon) of 504 km and aposelene (farthest point from the moon) of 7,502 km.





The first orbit reduction manoeuvre was carried out successfully on 9 November at 20:03 hrs IST. Thus the spacecraft was in lunar orbit with 200 km periselene. The aposelene remains unchanged (i.e 7,502 km).





After careful and detailed observation, a series of three orbit reduction manoeuvres were successfully carried out and the spacecraft’s orbit was reduced to its intended operational 100 km circular polar orbit on November 12.





On 14 November at 20:06 hrs IST, the Moon Impact Probe (MIP) was ejected from the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft and hard landed on the lunar surface near the South Polar Region at 20:31 hrs IST after 25 minutes journey. It placed the Indian tricolour, which was pasted on the sides of MIP on the Moon.





Currently, the scientific instruments/payloads are being commissioned sequentially and exploration of Moon with the array of onboard instruments have begun.


article adopted from : Indian Space Research Organisation


Web :http://www.isro.gov.in

Scientists Find High Energy Systems Hidden In 'Gas Cocoon'

a neutron star orbiting around a supergiant star, inside a cocoon of dust created by the powerful wind of the supergiant star. (Credit: University Paris 7 and Service d'Astrophysique, CEA, France)

(Feb. 13, 2007) — Astronomers have found a new class of objects in space: a neutron star orbiting inside a cocoon of cold gas and/or dust that hides a bloated supergiant star. In a strange twist of fate, these objects may be tremendously luminous, but the enshrouding cocoon absorbs almost all their emission, making them nearly invisible to telescopes on Earth until now.




These findings were presented on Feb. 5, 2007 by Dr. Sylvain Chaty of the University Paris 7 and Service d'Astrophysique, CEA, France, at the first Gamma Ray Large-Area Space Telescope (GLAST) scientific Symposium meeting in Palo Alto, Calif.




This result, obtained through multi-wavelength observations, is of special interest because it revolutionizes the view scientists have on the formation, evolution, and fate of massive stars in close binary (twin star) systems. Furthermore, this clearly demonstrates that the GLAST satellite will likely discover more of these new and unexpected celestial objects.



This new class of objects was discovered using the European ”INTErnational Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory” (INTEGRAL) satellite. Twenty of these binary systems were found, with estimated distances lying between 7,000 and 25,000 light years from Earth, putting them all inside of our own Milky Way Galaxy. The nature of these sources was revealed through multi-wavelength observations, mainly from optical to mid-infrared (MIR) wavelengths, using European Southern Observatory (ESO) facilities.



Scientists have found that most of these sources are made up of a compact object orbiting a supergiant star, an enormous star with 30 times the Sun’s mass and 20 times its diameter. Stars like this eject a huge amount of cold gas and/or dust at a rate equivalent to emitting the mass of our Sun in just 100,000 years. This type of object is called a High Mass X-ray Binary System (HMXB) and in most cases the compact object is a neutron star, an object of about 1.4 solar masses concentrated in a radius of only 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). Normally, an object like this would be an intense source of X-rays as the tremendous gravity and magnetic fields of the neutron star interact with the dense gas and dust emitted from the more massive supergiant star. However, for this new class of objects the cocoon of cold gas and/or dust is so dense it absorbs most, but not quite all, of the high energy X-rays. Only multi-wavelength observations, from X-rays to infrared, were able to reveal the nature of such objects.



These systems seem to divide into two classes, likely depending on the size and eccentricity (ellipticity) of the orbit of the neutron star around its companion. In the first class of objects, such as IGR J16318-4848, the neutron star orbits around the supergiant star along a roughly circular orbit, like the Earth does around the Sun. However, in this case, the orbit is far smaller: the distance from the neutron star to the supergiant is less than the distance of Mercury from the Sun—even though the supergiant star’s radius is 20 times bigger than that of the Sun.



Since the cocoon of cold gas/dust totally blankets the whole system, the neutron star stays permanently inside this dense cocoon, so there is a persistent source of X-rays. But in the second class, such as IGR J17544-2619, the orbit is more eccentric, and the neutron star crosses only periodically into this dense cocoon of cold gas/dust covering the supergiant star, causing intermittent emission of X-rays during that time.



As Dr. Chaty, Associate Professor of Astrophysics at University Paris 7 and Service d'Astrophysique, CEA, France, points out, these findings are important because “…until now only a few high energy systems hosting supergiant stars were known, and none were exhibiting such a high absorption. We now have an example where we know the extent of the material causing this absorption, and also where it is coming from.”



"This finding will help us to understand the formation, evolution and fate of such massive stars in high energy binary systems. This result demonstrates that astronomers will likely discover previously unknown objects with the GLAST satellite, and that a multi-wavelength approach can be decisive to unveil their nature.”



Further work, both observational and theoretical, is therefore needed to study the environment of supergiant stars in binary star systems. GLAST, with its sensitivity to very high-energy gamma rays, will provide an ideal platform for follow-up observations. GLAST is slated for launch in the fall of 2007. It is a collaborative effort between NASA, the U.S. Department of Energy and institutions in France, Germany, Japan, Italy and Sweden. General Dynamics has been chosen to build the spacecraft.





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Adapted from materials provided by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center.

Space Tornado

May 1, 2006 — The spirals of a "space tornado" may be the first step in the formation of a new star. The structure, observed with NASA's Spitzer infrared telescope, is a shock wave created by a jet of material slamming on a cloud of interstellar gas and dust at more than 100 miles per second, heating the cloud and causing it to glow. Physicists say the jet may have been generated by magnetic fields.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--They can be destructive and deadly, and they're not just something that happens here on earth! Tornadoes are the most erratic, unpredictable and violent of storms, and now scientists are finding out they happen in the most unusual places!




Physicist Giovanni Fazio has spotted tornadoes in space. With the help of his infrared camera on board NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers discovered what looked like a tornado in space.



"I was responsible for building one of the cameras on board there that took this picture of the tornado," Fazio, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., tells DBIS. "We were quite surprised when I saw it. I never saw anything like this before in my life."



The surprise turned out to be a shock-wave created by a jet of material flowing through a vast cloud of interstellar gas and dust. The jet slammed into neighboring dust clouds at more than 100 miles per second, heating the dust and causing it to glow.



"When stars form, they form from the collapse of a cloud of gas and dust. And in the process of the gas and dust falling in, it doesn't fall directly in -- it sort of spirals in slowly," Fazio says.



He adds understanding a star's formation may someday help astronomers understand the formation of our galaxy. "How did we get here, and where are we going? That's what we are trying to understand."



So while tornados on earth can be destructive, tornadoes in space could reveal the mysteries of the universe.



Astronomers say they can only speculate about the source of the spiraling jet. One explanation? Magnetic fields throughout the region might have shaped the tornado-like object.



BACKGROUND: Using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered a cosmic jet that looks like a giant tornado whirling in space. The "tornado" is actually a shock wave created by a jet of material flowing through a vast cloud of interstellar gas and dust. The jet slams into neighboring dust clouds at a speed of more than 100 miles per second, heating the dust so that it glows with infrared light. The Spitzer telescope detects that light.



WHAT ARE COSMIC JETS: Astronomers believe that cosmic jets form when a massive object, such as a neutron star or black hole, draws in matter, which forms a whirling "accretion disk" around the object. Friction within the disk can heat it to very high temperatures, so that excess energy is vented by ejecting subatomic particles from the poles of the disk at speeds approaching that of light. Scientists believe the jets start out fairly broad and then narrow into a funnel because of the strong magnetic field lines, which rotate and accelerate the jet of particles.



ABOUT THE SPITZER TELESCOPE: The Spitzer Space Telescope was launched on 25 August 2003. Spitzer detects the infrared energy radiated by objects in space. Most of this infrared radiation is blocked by the Earth's atmosphere and cannot be observed from the ground. Spitzer allows us to peer into regions of space that are hidden from optical telescopes. Many areas of space are filled with vast, dense clouds of gas and dust that block our view. Infrared light, however can penetrate these clouds, allowing us to peer into regions of star formation, the centers of galaxies, and into newly forming planetary systems. Infrared also brings us information about the cooler objects in space, such as smaller stars which are too dim to be detected by their visible light, extrasolar planets, and giant molecular clouds. Also, many molecules in space, including organic molecules, have their unique signatures in the infrared.



The American Astronomical Society contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Pre-life Molecules Present In Comets

ScienceDaily (July 27, 2006) — Evidence of atomic nitrogen in interstellar gas clouds suggests that pre-life molecules may be present in comets, a discovery that gives a clue about the early conditions that gave rise to life, according to researchers from the University of Michigan and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.




The finding also substantially changes the understanding of chemistry in space.




The question of why molecular nitrogen hasn't been detected in comets and meteorites has puzzled scientists for years. Because comets are born in the cold, dark, outer reaches of the solar system they are believed to be the least chemically altered during the formation of the Sun and its planets.



Studies of comets are thought to provide a "fossil" record of the conditions that existed within the gas cloud that collapsed to form the solar system a little more than 4.6 billion years ago. In this cloud, since nitrogen was thought to be in molecular form, and it follows that comets should contain molecular nitrogen as well.



But the reason it isn't there is because it isn't present in the gas clouds whose microscopic solid particles eventually form comets, said Sébastien Maret, research fellow in astronomy at the University of Michigan, and Edwin Bergin, a professor of astronomy at the University of Michigan. Those clouds contain mostly atomic nitrogen, not molecular nitrogen, as previously thought.



Maret, Bergin, and collaborators from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics will publish their findings in the July 27 issue of the journal Nature.



The nitrogen bearing molecules in comets that crashed into Earth millions of years ago may have provided a sort of "pre-biotic jump start" to form the complex molecules that eventually led to life here, Bergin said.



"A lot of complex and simple biotic molecules have nitrogen and it's much easier to make complex molecules from atomic nitrogen," Bergin said. "All DNA bases have atomic nitrogen in them, amino acids also have atomic nitrogen in them. By that statement what we're saying is if you have nitrogen in its simplest form, the atomic form, it's much more reactive and can more easily form complex prebiotic organics in space". These complex organics were incorporated into comets and were provided to the Earth.



"What we're seeing in space is telling us something about how you make molecules that led to us," Bergin said.



Also of importance is the fact that odd anomalies in isotopic values in meteorites can also be explained if the nitrogen is not molecular, Bergin said.





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Adapted from materials provided by University of Michigan.

Comets Throw Light On Solar System's Beginnings

Scientists already know that comets played a significant role in ensuring that conditions were right for life on Earth. Most of the icy, small planetary bodies that otherwise became comets went into forming the gas giant planets in the outer Solar System but some were ejected from the vicinity of the largest planets. Of these, a fraction ended up in the inner Solar System bringing water and biogenic elements of interest to Earth. Without this cometary transport, life on Earth may never have had a chance to start.




Now, scientists from the Space Research Centre at the University of Leicester have, for the first time, brought samples of the Comet Wild-2 to Diamond. In doing so, using Diamond’s microfocus spectroscopy capabilities – bright and powerful X-rays with a beam size equivalent to one 25th of a human hair – they have discovered that the old model of comets as dusty iceballs is not the whole picture.



Dr John Bridges, from the Space Research Centre, explains the results, ‘Comets are starting to look a lot more complicated than the old dusty iceball idea. For one thing Wild-2 contains material, like chromium oxides, from the hot inner Solar System – so how did that material get mixed in with a comet which has spent most of its life beyond Neptune? It suggests that there has been major mixing of material from inner and outer parts of the Solar System in its earliest stages.



‘At Diamond, we have also been finding X-ray signatures of iron oxides. These are important because they show that on the Wild-2 nucleus there could have been small trickles of water that deposited these minerals. Similar grains are found in carbonaceous chondrite meteorites. This might mean that there have been localised heating events perhaps caused by impact on the Wild-2 nucleus that melted some of its ice.’



Their samples, which were born in the Kuiper Belt near Neptune, were collected by the Stardust space mission, which involved a seven year long, five billion km, journey. They then travelled by more conventional means (Fedex) from the US to the Space Research Centre. The Stardust mission was conceived so that comets could be studied directly as this will help researchers to find out more about the Solar System’s water and the dust that escaped planetary formation.



Dr Bridges adds, ‘It’s now becoming clear that not all comets are the same. For instance, Wild-2 may have more similarities to some asteroids and primitive meteorites than comets from the Oort Cloud, which extends to the outer limits of our Solar System and which are infrequent visitors to Earth.’



The University of Leicester team plan to study more cometary tracks at Diamond in the months to come, from which they will be able to establish accurate comparisons with meteorites and determine the processes – such as liquid water in the nucleus and mixing in material from the hot inner Solar System – that have gone towards forming comets.





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Adapted from materials provided by British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Evidence Of Liquid Water In Comets Reveals Possible Origin Of Life

ScienceDaily (July 31, 2009) — Comets have contained vast amounts of liquid water in their interiors during the first million years of their formation, a new study claims.

The watery environment of early comets, together with the vast quantity of organics already discovered in comets, would have provided ideal conditions for primitive bacteria to grow and multiply. So argue Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe and his colleagues at the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology in a paper published in the International Journal of Astrobiology.




The Cardiff team has calculated the thermal history of comets after they formed from interstellar and interplanetary dust approximately 4.5 billion years ago. The formation of the solar system itself is thought to have been triggered by shock waves that emanated from the explosion of a nearby supernova. The supernova injected radioactive material such as Aluminium-26 into the primordial solar system and some became incorporated in the comets. Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe together with Drs Janaki Wickramasinghe and Max Wallis claim that the heat emitted from radioactivity warms initially frozen material of comets to produce subsurface oceans that persist in a liquid condition for a million years.



Professor Wickramasinghe said: "These calculations, which are more exhaustive than any done before, leaves little doubt that a large fraction of the 100 billion comets in our solar system did indeed have liquid interiors in the past.



Comets in recent times could also liquefy just below their surfaces as they approach the inner solar system in their orbits. Evidence of recent melting has been discovered in recent pictures of comet Tempel 1 taken by the "Deep Impact" probe in 2005."



The existence of liquid water in comets gives added support for a possible connection between life on Earth and comets. The theory, known as cometary panspermia, pioneered by Chandra Wickramasinghe and the late Sir Fred Hoyle argues the case that life was introduced to Earth by comets.


Journal reference:


J.T. Wickramasinghe, N.C. Wickramasinghe and M.K. Wallis. Liquid water and organics in Comets: implications for exobiology. International Journal of Astrobiology, 2009; 1 DOI: 10.1017/S1473550409990127

Adapted from materials provided by Cardiff University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Fly's Eyes Inspire Robot Vision

The Cognition for Technical Systems research group in Munich has been working on improved robot vision systems based on fly vision. Why?









The fly's brain is hardly bigger than a pinhead, too small by far to enable the fly's feats if it functioned exactly the way the human brain does. It must have a simpler and more efficient way of processing images from the eyes into visual perception, and that is a subject of intense interest for robot builders.

The article notes that some flies process images at 100 frames per second, allowing in-flight obstacle avoidance with millisecond response time, something you may have noticed if you ever tried to swat a fly. In particular the researchers are focusing (no pun intended) on optical flow, or as they call it, "optical flux fields". The fly's optical flux field implementation is made up of a first layer of neurons that process the raw input from each compound eye element and feed it to a second stage composed of only 60 neurons for each hemisphere, which reduce the visual field to a series of motion vectors giving the speed and direction of everything it sees. Condylostylus fly macro image by flickr user Opo Terser

Robots: Smart Homes


Posted 31 Jul 2009 at 09:22 UTC by mwaibel



As we've noted previously, robots may well be the future of aging. But mobile robots are not the only option - integrating sensors and actuators into buildings to create smart homes may offer different, complementary benefits. In the new episode of the Robots podcast, Roger Orpwood, director of the Bath Institute of Medical Engineering in the UK, explains how smart homes can be used to help dementia patients stay independent and receive better care. In a second interview Andrew Sixsmith, Professor of Gerontology at the Simon Fraser University in Canada, then shares his insights into the problems and some smart home solutions for dementia patients from a medical perspective

The Mars Pathfinder Sojourner Rover

The Mars Pathfinder Sojourner Rover, a lightweight machine on wheels, accomplished a revolutionary feat on the surface of Mars. For the first time, a thinking robot equipped with sophisticated laser eyes and automated programming reacted to unplanned events on the surface of another planet.

After a few days on the Martian surface the NASA controllers turned on Sojourner's hazard avoidance system and asked it to start making some of its own decisions. This hazard avoidance system set the rover apart from all other machines that have explored space. Sojourner made trips between designated points without the benefit of detailed information to warn it of obstacles along the way

Sojourner moved slowly at one and one half feet per minute and stopped a lot along the way to sense the terrain and process information, but there was no hurry on Mars which is not visited very often.

Sojourner was carried to Mars by Pathfinder which launched on December 4, 1996 and reached Mars on July 4, 1997, directly entering the planet's atmosphere and bouncing on inflated airbags.

Sojourner was designed by a large NASA team lead by Jacob Matijevic and Donna Shirley.

Sojouner traveled a total of about 100 meters (328 feet) in 230 commanded maneuvers, performed more than 16 chemical analyses of rocks and soil, carried out soil mechanics and technology experiments, and explored about 250 square meters (2691 square feet) of the Martian surface. During the mission, the spacecraft relayed an unprecedented 2.3 gigabits of data, including 16,500 images from the lander's camera, 550 images from the rover camera, 16 chemical analyses of rocks and soil, and 8.5 million measurements of atmospheric pressure, temperature and wind.

The flight team lost communication with the Sojouner September 27, after 83 days of daily commanding and data return. In all, the small 10.5 kilogram (23 lb) Sojouner operated 12 times its expected lifetime of seven days.

Supermodel Humanoid Robot of Japan

1 of 4Full Size

By Chika Osaka

The HRP-4C humanoid robot showed off her stormtrooper-like silver and black frame and bowed to a fashion-savvy audience at the start of the annual Japan Fashion Week in Tokyo -- but even her creators admit the mechanical model needs more work.

The HRP-4C has battery-powered motors in her body and face, allowing her to imitate the expressions, gait and poses of a supermodel --- up to a point.

"Our robot can't move elegantly like the real models that are here today," Shuji Kajita, director of humanoid robot engineering at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), told Reuters. "It'll take another 20 to 30 years of research to make that happen."

The 158 cm (5 ft 2 inch) high-tech model weighed in at 43 kg (95 lb), slimmed down from earlier versions just in time for her catwalk debut at one of Japan's biggest fashion events.

AIST designers say the eyes, face and hair of the robot, which cost about $2 million to develop, are based on Japanese "anime" cartoon characters.

Japan, home to almost half of the world's 800,000 industrial robots, expects the industry to expand to $10 billion in the future including models that can care for its fast-growing elderly population.

(Writing by Michael Caronna and Linda Sieg; Editing by Rodney Joyce)

Humanoid Robot

humanoid robot is a robot with its overall appearance based on that of the human body, allowing interaction with made-for-human tools or environments. In general humanoid robots have a torso with a head, two arms and two legs, although some forms of humanoid robots may model only part of the body, for example, from the waist up. Some humanoid robots may also have a 'face', with 'eyes' and 'mouth'. Androids are humanoid robots built to aesthetically resemble a human.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HONDA_ASIMO.jpg

A humanoid robot is an autonomous robot because it can adapt to changes in its environment or itself and continue to reach its goal. This is the main difference between humanoid and other kinds of robots. In this context, some of the capacities of a humanoid robot may include, among others:

• self maintenance (recharge itself)
• autonomous learning (learn or gain new capabilities without outside assistance, adjust strategies based on the surroundings and adapt to new situations)
• avoiding harmful situations to people, property, and itself
• safe interacting with human beings and the environment

Like other mechanical robots, humanoid refer to the following basic components too: Sensing, Actuating and Planning and Control. Since they try to simulate the human structure and behaviour and they are autonomous systems, most of the times humanoid robots are more complex than other kinds of robots.

This complexity affects all robotic scales (mechanical, spatial, time, power density, system and computational complexity), but it is more noticeable on power density and system complexity scales. In the first place, most current humanoids aren’t strong enough even to jump and this happens because the power/weight ratio is not as good as in the human body. The dynamically balancing Anybots Dexter can jump, but poorly so far. On the other hand, there are very good algorithms for the several areas of humanoid construction, but it's very difficult to merge all of them into one efficient system (the system complexity is very high). Nowadays, these are the main difficulties that humanoid robots development has to deal with.

Their creators' goal for the robot is that one day it will be able to both understand human intelligence, reason and act like humans. If humanoids are able to do so, they could eventually work alongside humans. Another important benefit of developing androids is to understand the human body's biological and mental processes, from the seemingly simple act of walking to the concepts of consciousness and spirituality. Right now they are used for welding. In the future they can greatly assist humans by welding and mining for coal.

Model Robot Showing Emotions

The new Japanese humanoid robot HRP-4C displays a range of emotions (good luck discerning what they are) during a press conference in suburban Tokyo this week. Naturally, plenty of paparazzi were on hand.

(Credit: AFP Photo/Yoshikazu Tsuno)

She doesn't have the grace of a Cindy Crawford or Elle MacPherson (yet), but a few struts on the catwalk may help HRP-4C loosen up and hit her stride. The walking, talking girlbot will be getting practice soon, as she's set to make her catwalk debut at a Tokyo fashion show next week.

Scientists from Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology reportedly designed the 5-foot (ish), dark-haired creation to look like an average Japanese woman between the ages of 19 and 29. Unlike the average Japanese woman, however, HRP-4C has 30 motors in her body that allow her to walk and move its arms (somewhat loudly and awkwardly, if the video below is any indication) and 8 facial motors for blinking, smiling, and expressing emotions akin to anger and surprise.

According to the Associated Press, the robotic framework for the HRP-4C, sans face and other coverings, will sell for about $200,000, and the technology behind it will eventually be made public so people can come up their own moves for the bot.